Publishers and distributors of online content, also referred to as online content providers, have two options to produce revenue from their content and support their infrastructure. The first option is the subscription based model. The second option is the advertising based model.
A subscription based model requires a user to pay an online content provider before the user is permitted access to some or all of the content of that online content provider. Payment may be rendered on the basis of a recurring periodic model or based on a pay-per-access model.
An advertising based model relies on display advertising to generate revenue per page of content. In many such models, a first lesser amount of revenue is generated by displaying an advertisement to an end user, otherwise referred to as an advertisement impression, and a second greater amount of revenue is generated when a visitor clicks on a displayed advertisement. In other words, an online content provider generates revenue based on the number of advertisements that are delivered and displayed to visitors of the online content provider sites and based on the number of advertisement click-throughs that result from the advertisements displayed on the online content provider sites.
Online content provider are cognizant that simply increasing the number of advertisements displayed on one site could lead to less visitors and thus less advertisement impressions, because a large number of advertisements displayed on one site could make the user experience less enjoyable (as a result of greater load times) and could make the site appear that it is full of spamming elements. Consequently, online content providers realize that the best method to increase the number of advertisement impressions that their pages receive is by offering more interesting and engaging content. The goal is to maintain visitors on the sites of the online content provider as long as possible with the visitors visiting as many of the internal links or sites that are accessible from the landing site of the online content provider as possible. For example, the home page of cnn.com is rich in breaking news with several internal links. Each internal link accesses a different news article. The home page of cnn.com also contains advertisements in the form of banner ads, sponsored links to other sites, etc. Accordingly, when a visitor lands on the cnn.com home page, the visitor is presented with a first set of advertisements that generate the content provider a first set of monetized impressions and when the visitor clicks on a link for a specific news article, the visitor is taken to an internal site with a second set of advertisements that generate the content provider a second set of monetized impressions.
The online content provider can also increase the number of click-throughs by targeting advertisements to the preferences and interests of their site visitors. Accordingly, online content providers and advertising agencies (that provide the advertisements for display on the sites of the online content providers) analyze the content offered on the sites of the online content providers to balance and maximize the user experience (the smooth consumption of the content) and the types of display units to produce revenue. For example, a video game review site may include advertisements to purchase recently released video games as most visitors to the video game review site are interested in video games.
Nevertheless, offered content is not always of interest to some site visitors. These visitors may come to a site accidentally by clicking on an unintended link. Additionally, these visitors may correctly navigate to the site, but quickly realize that the site does not contain sought after content. In some such instances, these visitors will leave the site by clicking on the browser back button to return to search engine results or a site that was accessed prior to the current site that the visitor wishes to leave. This is referred to as a “bounce” with the visitor referred to as a “bouncing visitor”. Visitors that bounce from a site result in little to no monetization to the online content provider because the number of advertisement impressions is limited and because such visitors do not produce any advertisement click-throughs. In fact, to monetize on advertisement impressions, some advertisers require visitors to remain on the site of an online content provider that displays an advertisement for a certain amount of time (e.g., two seconds) before the display of the advertisement is considered an impression that can be monetized. Therefore, when a visitor leaves the site before the specified amount of time, the advertisement display is not considered an impression and the online content provider displaying the advertisement is not provided advertising revenue for that visitor.
The reality of the Internet is that a significant percentage of visitors to any site are bouncing visitors. These visitors result in less impactful advertisement campaigns and the devaluation of the space. As traditional advertising models are unable to effectively monetize on the visits of these bouncing visitors, there is a need for new advertising systems and methods that overcome the deficiencies of traditional advertising models and that nevertheless enable online content providers to monetize on the visits of such bouncing visitors. Specifically, there is a need to monetize the visits from these bouncing visits by identifying them and displaying a large format ad unit as the visitor leaves or bounces from the site. This kind of high impact focus allows for a more complete advertising experience and high monetization levels on previously underserved visitors. This also avoids the growing trend of “ad blindness” where experienced web content consumers (i.e., visitors) block out traditional advertisement units.